Update: I was unfortunately not aware of Shamus Young's severe criticism of Fallout 3 available here to link in the original piece and I regret that. It dovetails rather nicely with what I've written and it's much better executed than my piece. I strongly recommend anyone...

Avengers Hype Heals All Wounds, Except THQ's

Remember this? DO YOU?! I do! First-person shooters are a dime a dozen, but first-person action games have a certain... je ne sais quoi, something intangibly interesting about them. It's that indefinable quality that made Mirror's Edge so exhiliarating or the first-person in The Elder Scrolls V: Skryim so appealing.

Sure, you could play in third-person, but what's the fun in that. YOU ARE THE GUY in first-person games. So why am I not playing a first-person Avengers game right now?

Earlier this year, THQ was rumored to be closing shop, then an ex-employee got super pissed, then lots of people were laid off, then the publisher of games like SpongeBob Everything, U-Draw, and Darksiders II was threatened with delisting.

Naturally, they had to shed a lot of extra unnecessary weight to get their profits back to a comfortable point. I just hope they didn't throw the baby out with the bath water.

It's true that THQ seems to be doing fine, just fine at this point, but where would they be if Avengers fever was picking up their newly published tie-in and running away with it? I can't seem to take a piss outside without some kind of Avengers blimp telling me about the movie.

Even microwave pizzas want me to go see this movie. I'll oblige, pizza. I promise you. Just let me eat you first.

I suppose publishers got wise to the fact that we hate movie tie-ins. Seriously. Check out this review of a movie tie-in, or this one, or this one. They suck! They are shitty games! But this Avengers game, the one where I'm beating the alien snot out of a Fantastic-Four Super Skrull as the Hulk in first-person... that one looked good!

Should THQ have held on to this project, this one property? Could it have aided their bottom line in a way they desperately need? No one will ever know. It is doomed to history, a time only comic books manage to rewrite. It's almost plainly obvious what happened: The Avengers movie ditched the Skrulls, and THQ was stuck with the cash it had poured into a project that'd have no directly correlation to the movie property.

But I say, screw that! The Avengers game should have continued on in the Skrull wars. Movie tie-ins are the most successful when they don't stick to the script, when they improvise. What if the game was set after the movie? What if disassociated itself with the movie's universe altogether?

If Warner Bros. can find success marrying a game with an IP loosely enough to create Batman: Arkham City, why couldn't THQ do the same with the Avengers?